By far the best weather app.
A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
231–240 of 255 posts
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#232I'm not a phone user, so the presentation of weather for me always tends to look fairly different than anything you'd "typically" see on a phone. That said, I have a hard time imagining how I could improve on the data density, clarity and depth of this 10 day forecast, customized by me, from wunderground.com https://imgur.com/5PIiB1h.png You can see clearly: * 24hr temperature cycles * cloud cover vs. sun * wind spee…
doesnt say what it feels like, so immediately not useful for me
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#233It was a masterpiece. Apple deleting Dark Sky something I will never forgive them for. Maybe not enough to make me switch phones, but enough to make me look elsewhere when needing peripheral items. The statement that Dark Sky features were incorporated into the native weather app was an insult. I know I sound dramatic talking about a weather app, but it was in a class of its own and nothing else is remotely comparabl…
Can I just piggyback on this to shit on the iOS Weather app for a moment? Whoever designed it doesn't understand the concept of daily max/min temperatures, and the daily low presented in the app is the lowest during that calendar day, rather than the forecast overnight low following the day. It drives me absolutely mad, because I can never reliably determine how cold it will get overnight without going into the hourl…
Daily min/max by calendar day has never been a standard.
Weather is not divided by some arbitrary time humans created. Max and min temperatures occur overwhelmingly in their respective day and night cycle. Adding some arbitrary cut off point in the middle of those cycles just makes comprehending max/min temps unnecessarily more difficult then it needs to be.
What if we set the calendar day to change at midday, would we start reporting max temps up to 12pm, past 12pm? How useful do you think that info would be?
People are interested in the overnight minimum, not a confusing minimum that could be either early morning or just before midnight depending on the weather at the time.
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#234The explanation of the flaw (if there is one) in the temperature display doesn’t make sense. Both apps are scaling the temperature bars in the same way. The Weather app is just putting a dark background behind the “pills” and left/right aligning the numbers. The pills/bars themselves are the same on both.
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#235The very first thing I noticed in the screenshots was the presence of arrows in the cloud cover/radar image. This immediately conveys where the storm is headed.
In contrast, one of my least favorite parts of the Apple weather app is the radar view --- in order to see where a storm is headed I need to open the map, select the 24 hour forecast, wait for all the data to load (often several seconds, if not more!), and then let the whole animation play out. What would take me less than half a second on Dark Sky ends up taking me 10-30+ seconds on Apple Weather.
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#236Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's very rare that I need to know about what the weather was like a few hours in the past.
Then don’t look at past temps. The daily low is the lowest temp of the day. It could very well be in the future. But it’s certainly not in the next day, and it’s not from a specific hour. If you want to see tomorrow mornings temps look at tomorrow’s hourly temps. Do you expect the daily high to work the same? So maybe at 4pm it’s down from the daily high and now it shows today’s high is actually some temp around 3pm…
How about we categorise it by the day/night cycles like we have since before we walked on 2 legs? Not some arbitrary time model we created that happens to divide the night cycle at midnight. Daytime max, overnight min.
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#237Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also Merry Sky[1], which uses the Pirate Weather API. Open-Meteo is also interesting. [1]: https://merrysky.net [2]: https://open-meteo.com
MerrySky is so good. Geometric Weather is a fantastic app with the same look and feel. Carrot Weather also just (?) added what is effectively a "DarkSky mode". It's lovely.
Geometric Weather looks good, but I'm not crazy about its Accuweather backend.
One newish app that's good (though it unfortunately doesn't have a status bar weather indicator) is omWeather[1], and it uses Open-Meteo as its backend.
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#238I'm not a phone user, so the presentation of weather for me always tends to look fairly different than anything you'd "typically" see on a phone. That said, I have a hard time imagining how I could improve on the data density, clarity and depth of this 10 day forecast, customized by me, from wunderground.com https://imgur.com/5PIiB1h.png You can see clearly: * 24hr temperature cycles * cloud cover vs. sun * wind spee…
doesnt say what it feels like, so immediately not useful for me
As mentioned in another reply, in the "Customize" list you can literally add "Feels like"
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#239I really miss Dark Sky. Apple choosing to kill the app was a huge mistake IMO. Despite them "integrating Dark Sky features" into Apple Weather, I still dislike the user interface and layout of Apple Weather in general. Dark Sky was everything I needed for weather. Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen.
I agree that killing off the standalone app was a mistake. It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared. > Part of me wishes they would listen to complaints and bring back the service, but I guess that will never happen. Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade? It seems to me that their usual mode of operation is to completely ignore feedb…
> It's particularly frustrating as a paid app just up and disappeared.
Didn't they give two year's notice?
> Is there an instance where Apple listened to customer feedback on a scale of less than a decade?
Is there an instance of them taking a decade?
Five years, for sure. See butterfly keyboards - people could hate it, it could have more widely reported failures but they can't replace it without revising the whole laptop's design (which they do every five years).
Re: A eulogy for Dark Sky, a data visualization masterpiece
#240The second complaint mentioned in the article: >Is there anything that has the precipitation graph similar to dark sky The precipitation graph is in the Weather app, so it's unclear why this is being included as a complaint about the Weather app?
To find it, you need to know that tapping on the hourly weather view gives you the temperature graph. Then you need to click the thermostat icon and switch it to precipitation. Only then is the information displayed. Once it's onscreen, the precipitation graph in the Apple Weather app centers on the full day view (with the current time in the middle) rather than just the future, which is what most users care about. T…
> To find it, you need to know that tapping on the hourly weather view gives you the temperature graph.
To find it, you need to know that the interface is interactive the same way as other interfaces like control center are - clicking a 'tile' pops/navigates to more details.
You don't have to tap on temperature - tapping on the precipitation forecast will drill down to precipitation estimates.
Just know that Apple Weather (like Dark Sky before it) uses multiple different models, so the forecasts 15 minutes, 2 hours, and 1 day out are likely to be reasoned about entirely differently.